Like Classical, Like Beer

It's about time I got back to posting to this blog about music. Months have slipped by since my last post, and my project to develop a website on music theory has pretty much bitten the dust. Meanwhile, oddly enough, I find that my interest in classical music has picked up. For whatever reason, I have somehow gotten over the hump of not being able to relish the so-called complexities of classical as well as I'd like to.

Classical music seems to be something of an acquired taste, much like beer. Over the last several years I've developed a taste for so-called craft beers — the beers with lots of flavor, and with flavor notes of all different sorts — by drinking a lot. A nasty job, but someone had to do it. At first, it was hard to like the more complex ales, especially the ones that have a great deal of hop bitterness. Now, those are my favorites.

The same is true of classical music. The more complex the piece — the greater the composer's admixture of the harsher musical "flavors" — the more off-putting the listening experience can be at first. Yet those are the very pieces that grow on one. With repeated listening, one is surprised to find the greatest loveliness in the most astringent sounds.


The real secret of my success at conquering my total classical ineptitude may turn out to be the book Classical Music for Dummies, by Pogue and Speck. Here is a book that manages to set forth the entire history of classical music in 80 pages! True, 40 would have been better, but there are a lot of pictures.

Here is a book that gives you advice on how to score cheap symphony tickets and even recycles the ten best classical music jokes ever.

Most important, here is a book that gives you a play by play on each piece on the accompanying CD, broken down by time. For example, take the piece identified as Handel's Water Music Suite No. 2, Alla Hornpipe. (I don't know who that Alla fella was, but never mind.) Actually, that designation should probably be "Suite No. 12," not "Suite No. 2," according to the track listings of several Handel's Water Music CDs at Amazon.com. I'm confident the authors, well-known experts in the field, made that slip just to give this budding savant an opportunity to say he one-upped the pros. But never mind.

Alla Hornpipe, at any rate, purports to be not a person but a piece of music based on (you guessed it) "a familiar 'sailor's hornpipe' melody." The authors don't say whether it was "familiar" before Handel ever "wrote" it — perhaps he was some sort of Baroque-period plagiarist or something. At any rate, it starts off with that "familiar 'sailor's hornpipe' melody," played in the woodwinds. Then, at time code 0:16, the trumpets start playing that same "familiar 'sailor's hornpipe' melody." At 0:23, for something completely different, it's the French horns' turn to play that very same "familiar 'sailor's hornpipe' melody."

A major upheaval then transpires at 0:35: for the very first time — but by no means the last — it's the strings that start playing that same "familiar 'sailor's hornpipe' melody."

From that point on, in a delightful bit of sheer pandemonium, the various sections of the orchestra take turns with the entire orchestra as a whole in bringing that "familiar 'sailor's hornpipe' melody" to that which the authors (as well as Handel) deem to be "a satisfying conclusion."

That takes us up to moment 1:03, at which time, I kid you not, "the musicians repeat everything they've played up to this point, note for note." And you thought classical music was tricky!

Not only that, but after a contrasting "middle section" that lasts for an all-too-brief 58 seconds, Handel has the orchestra simply repeat the first 1:02 of the piece. It's not quite déjà vu all over again, though, since this time the "familiar 'sailor's hornpipe' melody" starts off in the strings (gasp!) not the woodwinds.

That contrasting "middle section" that lasts for an all-too-brief 58 seconds is, however, a cool idea of Handel's. It's contrasting because it has, believe it or not, a different melody. And it's kinda quiet, since the brass have shut up for this part. Moreover, for you technical aficionadoes, the music's key shifts from major to minor.

Because the "middle section" is bookended by two sections that are for all intents and purposes carbon copies of one another, what we have here is that which seemingly "became the basis for sonata form," just about the greatest thing since sliced bread at the time, which was 1717. Sonata form: that's basically when a composer with two good musical ideas just doesn't have a third ready to hand. So what he does is present the first good idea in — get ready for some insider lingo here — the "exposition." Then he presents the second, contrasting good idea in the "development." Finally, lacking yet a third good idea, he sneakily recapitulates the original exposition one more time, in what is called, appropriately, the "recapitulation."

Oh, it gets way more complicated than that in the true Classical period which followed the simpler Baroque — the time of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and all those good folks — but understand the pattern A-B-A and you basically understand sonata form.


So there you have it. Classical music is prmarily a matter of repetition. Plus, contrast. Plus, a whole bunch of extra fillips like key changes and assigning the same music to different instruments so you don't really notice how few musical ideas the composer actually had.

Maybe that's why I like beer so much. After a few cold ones, you don't really care whether you hear a fresh musical idea, ever again.